THE DEPTHS OF SPACE

Vector graphics often look much like comics: although you can hint at shading and highlights, it is more or less impossible to achieve photorealism. But this could all change now that Xara LX has been released as an open source program.

If you compare the effort involved in drawing a 3D scene using a pencil and paper with the 3D modeling approach, you will soon discover that you are quicker doing things the old fashioned way. The closest you can get to the pen and paper feel on a computer is to use a drawing tablet with a bitmap editor such as the Gimp. But with vector graphics, which are freely scalable without affecting quality, artists typically find it hard to implement reflected light gradients or shading. Vector graphics applications such as Inkscape only offer linear, radial, or conical gradients that are not suited to the task of depicting the kind of highlighting and shading you see on objects with more complex shapes.

PDF is always a good choice say some people. As a test, we produced PDF files only to maltreat them with several open source programs. Some of the editors and extractors do a very good job, but others fail completely.

Although Walt Disney’s masterpieces are not forgotten, legacy cartoon techniques are a thing of the past. As long ago as 1995, the movie “Toy Story” proved that computers are more than up to the task of animating pictures. We’ll help you get started with building your own animations.